What?
Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and find areas of interest.
I highly recommend that anyone else who feels the same way look into Acton Academy. The model is based on project based work, self guided learning, and Socratic discussions. There are locations all throughout the U.S. My six year old may not recognize all the material for a standardized test, but he’s fascinated by laws of physics, engineering for space, growing plants, and conservation. At home he wanted to start a project on simulating landing a Mars rover with a small programmable robot. He’s playing around with the idea of cushioning the landing versus building a parachute. And all of this is something we can tie back together to make interesting for him — because he has interests! How could we collect a plant seed after landing for example.
His approach to his other interests is similarly curious. He doesn’t want to be told how to fish by an authority, he wants to experiment with different techniques and think about how he can improve iteratively.
We stomp curiosity out of children in public schools. We need to stop.
I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could be fixed by paying teachers more. Why would a smart person become a teacher if a professional industry job will pay $300-500k and a teaching job will pay $100k? Is paying teachers so much even palatable to the general public?
salaries top out around 70K. That's ending salary, not starting salary.
And yes, this could be fixed by paying teachers more. And treating the profession with some respect.
I wanted to go into teaching but stopped after I realized what that would mean for my long term earnings. Even with time taken off as a stay at home parent and time spent working in the developing world, I’m getting close to the lifetime earnings for teachers who progress in their careers. In less than a decade of working.
1. Students with chronic behavior problems are easier to throw out
2. Parents are less likely to go on idiotic crusades about the content of the curriculum
3. The school board (or, more likely, the state legislature) isn't going to make irrelevant changes to appease voters
Private schools are more likely to treat their teachers as independent professionals rather than glorified babysitters or McEducation employees.
Here's the HS math sequence options from my local school district in VA. Can't speak to many other places but this is what my above comment is based on.
